


dreams made real (like a snowflake or something) (please try not to melt)

by beepbedeep



Category: Let It Snow (2019)
Genre: F/F, bits and pieces!, cute girls being cute together!, internalized homophobia is BAD, like!, what Kerry is thinking!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:42:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22110505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beepbedeep/pseuds/beepbedeep
Summary: They don’t see each other for two weeks and itsucksand Dorrie drafts what feels like hundreds of texts, but nothing is right and being around Kerry iswonderfulbut trying to get her attention now is terrifying so she sits in indecision and waits and waits for something to tip them over the edge.
Relationships: Dorrie/Kerry
Kudos: 6





	dreams made real (like a snowflake or something) (please try not to melt)

She’s an angel, Dorrie thinks, the first time their eyes meet. She glows, like there’s a bright hot ball of light shining through her skin and smile. They make eye contact and a jolt of electricity snaps through Dorrie and she’d blink it away, but the girl (Kerry) is smiling too, and it looks like an invitation. 

(later Dorrie will learn that Kerry’s eyes are not always open like that, sometimes they shut with a vengeance, closing out the rest of the world because _Kerry does not know how to deal with this_ and even later she will learn how to talk to Kerry when she’s upset, and they will learn how to rely on each other, and her eyes will still glaze over with darkness and denial because coping mechanisms are coping mechanisms but it will not make Dorrie’s stomach drop the way it used to and Kerry will learn how to talk herself back into the open.) 

The first time Kerry sees Dorrie she thinks of a fairy princess from a book she read in sixth grade. (she may or may not have had a HUGE crush on this fictional princess.) Dorrie shimmers, with conviction and power and _something else_ and Kerry wants to touch her, wants to feel whatever is sprinkled on the other girl’s skin, but that is many steps in the future, so instead she shakes off the tingling that is spreading across her body and smiles. 

(steps up, says hi, and almost loses her balance the first time she hears Dorrie’s voice, because something about it is _perfect_ but she’s an athlete and too well trained and potentially-repressed to collapse in the presence of a pretty girl like that) (being around Dorrie is what she imagines other kinds of gravity might feel like. Kerry feels lighter and braver and different, like she could take one good leap and sail up into the atmosphere which would be terrifying except that she’s pretty sure Dorrie would jump right after her and even if they couldn’t get down there’s no one she’d rather see the stars with.)

Meeting her is nice, like, _really, really nice_. Kerry is so excited that she forgets to be scared, so bold and buoyant and maybe Dorrie’s presence is still doing something to her because if you asked the Kerry of a few hours ago (who feels very far away) if she’d laugh at something a beautiful girl said (because Dorrie is funny) said hard enough that their faces would end up centimeters from each other and then, instead of pulling away, Kerry would dart forwards to press her lips against the other girl’s and if, instead of smiling awkwardly and leaning back, the aforementioned other girl would lean even closer and slide one of her (soft and gentle) hands around Kerry’s neck, smelling like vanilla shampoo and gum. And as they continue to kiss, Kerry loses her train of rational thought because she’s wanted to kiss a pretty girl in the light of day for years (until now it’s only been drunk-but-less-drunk-than-she-says-she-is-because-an-excuse-feels-better-than-the-truth in someone’s basement with an actually-drunk drunk girl who’s mad at her boyfriend) and wanted to kiss Dorrie like this since she’d first seen her, laughing with her best friend across the room. 

(it’s only later, on the other side of her front door after Dorrie drives away that the thrill fades and the panic hits her because _ohgodohgodohfuckfuckfuck_ she _wasn’t supposed to do that_ she’s not supposed to kiss random people anyway (but Dorrie isn’t really random, they go to school together and have probably had a class together and friends in common in their whole history of being in a tiny town) and a cute sweet _girl_ is someone she’s especially not supposed to kiss and _is she different now, will her friends smell this change on her skin_ and also _was she weird will Dorrie ever talk to her again_ and Kerry runs to the bathroom, careful to not wake her sister because it is almost obscenely late and she wipes (almost scrapes, rips) her makeup off, desperately looking to see if there’s some kind of oozing metaphors taking place across her skin, something that screams YOU KISSED A GIRL AND YOU WERE SOBER AND YOU LIKED IT MORE THAN PREVIOUSLY IMAGINED POSSIBLE AND SHE WAS ALSO REALLY NICE AND SMART AND THIS WAS THE BEST NIGHT EVER but all Kerry sees is her normal face, her normal skin, maybe a little paler than usual, eyes pinched from lack of sleep, but once she wipes the smudges of lipstick off her mouth there is no sign that anything remotely unusual has happened. She brushes her teeth and crawls into bed and when she closes her eyes Dorrie’s face, smiling softly in the low light of her front seat, is imprinted on her eyelids. 

They don’t see each other for two weeks and it _sucks_ and Dorrie drafts what feels like hundreds of texts, but nothing is right and being around Kerry is _wonderful_ but trying to get her attention now is _terrifying_ so she sits in indecision and waits and waits for something to tip them over the edge.

Kerry spends the time result trying to think about anything other than Dorrie’s hair and eyes and lips and laugh and _ohgodwhatissheevendoing_. She goes to a party with her friends and one of them asks her what’s wrong and for a minute she almost breaks, almost start crying because _she is so scared and what if this ruins everything and please tell me things are going to be ok_ but instead she squeezes her eyes shut and puts on a smile and if her friends can see the panic in her eyes no one says anything. (it’s not that she really thinks they’ll be upset, her friends are kind and supportive, but things might be different and even if she wanted to tell them the word get suck in her throat and up until now it’s been mostly fine but all she wants to do is find Dorrie and kiss her and not care who’s watching but Dorrie’s _not here_ and Kerry just _isn’t that brave when she’s alone_. 

She gets drunk and kisses a boy, kisses multiple boys the best way she knows how, trying to uncover some feeling, some pull like what tugs in her stomach when she looks at Dorrie, _anything at all_ that could make her forget everything else that’s tangled up in her head but each (very nice) boy is disappointing, she can’t trick herself into feeling something that just isn’t there, and she ends up crying in the bathroom as waves of floaty panic overwhelm her. She spends the rest of the night getting sober and taking care of her messier friends and only wants to rip her skin off three times. At the end of the night, in the bathroom, Mimi, a girl who’s she’s known since first grade, is one of her best friends, and happens to be ridiculously drunk, looks into her eyes with complete sincerity and whisperers “tell me your deepest secret.” 

Kerry is ready to laugh it off, say “you already know everything about me” but bathrooms at parties turn into their own secret universes and Mimi isn’t going to remember any of this in the morning or even in the next five minutes so she leans down and whispers into her friend’s hair, _I think I’m falling in love with this girl I met last week, like in a gay way_ , and Mimi smiles, muttering something that sounds like, “she _was_ super cute” before collapsing into giggles as someone else opens the bathroom door. She wants to text Dorrie, wants to share this insanity, but doesn’t have her number so instead she picks Mimi off the floor and heads out into the fray to collect the rest of their friends. She steps in three spilled drinks, sees a girl she vaguely thinks might be on debate making out with one of the boys she kissed earlier, they’re having a lot more fun now than he did with her. She drives everyone home and tries not to cry again, she doesn’t want to accidently kill all her friends in a car crash because she’s having a tiny crisis. 

Next week, another party. It comes at the end of a weird and terrible day – after practice the team decided Waffle Town was the best place for their weekly gossip-recap-and-sugar-fest and somehow (maybe because she’s been so distracted with thoughts of _would everything be different if I told them_ ) she’s forgotten the very real thing that Dorrie _works here_ and this is SO not how she envisioned their second meeting (but she’s been too scared to realistically imagine anything) but she can see Dorrie in the back and so she hurries to the booth before Dorrie turns around because her heart is about to break out of her chest and if she doesn’t sit down she might collapse which would just cause WAY too much attention. 

The rest of the afternoon passes in a blur, Dorrie sees her, _Dorrie’s smart and competent and works here so of course she does_ and she doesn’t know what to say so she doesn’t really say anything and watches as the hopeful spark in the eyes of the prettiest girl she’s ever met (she’s _so pretty it hurts_ ) dies out and when Mimi elbows her after the soap-horse debacle with a why-were-you-so-mean-to-that-girl look Kerry tries to focus on looking like a normal person and not run around screaming because Dorrie remembered something she said. Dorrie leaves, Dorrie comes back, it’s worse the second time, there’s a party and everyone wants to stay and Kerry can’t just tell them why she wants to leave and she doesn’t even want to leave because she’s pretty sure that at this point Dorrie will never speak to her again and she needs to figure out how to fix that but she has no idea how and Stuart Bale is just THERE which is honestly the least insane thing that’s happened today and once she purposefully walks past Dorrie into the women’s bathroom and kisses her because she doesn’t know what to say and it feels good ( _so, so good, even better than before_ ) but then one of her friends walks into the bathroom (Kerry isn’t even sure who, she just recognized the outfit and ran) and everything comes crashing down again and she knows she’s confusing Dorrie and wants to tell he everything but her jaw is stuck shut again so she runs back to the table and leans her head on Mimi’s shoulder and pretends to just be tired, like her chest doesn’t feel like it’s cracking open.

The party starts and it feels like a good one, full of bright thank-GOD-we’re-on-break energy and Kerry should be having fun, _is_ having fun, but the bubbly hey-that-girl-I-really-really-like-is-IN-THE-ROOM feeling has turned into a crawling, gross I-ruined-everything-help-help-help-how-do-I-fix-this turning in her stomach because all she really wants to do is have a super long conversation with Dorrie about superheroes or something and kiss her in the lightly falling snow, but everything feels bad and none of that is possible and if she can’t have the girl she would REALLY like to just go home and cry but that’s not possible either. 

Kerry holds her breath to keep it from coming out in shaky whimpers and jumps into the fray and tries to have a good time, really does, but Dorrie (who’s been accosted by a girl with a pig of all things, who she can’t keep her eyes off of, even when Mimi starts pulling her up and down to the beat of some song she would recognize if she had a brain cell that wasn’t solely focused on Dorrie) comes over with a new expression on her face and Kerry wants to explore it, wants to spend hours perusing this new facet, memorize its every nuance and meaning, but right now _there really isn’t time_ because Dorrie starts talking and it takes very ounce of Kerry’s strength to not crumble or turn into a small hairless hamster. 

(Ok, so like, Dorrie doesn’t _get it_. Kerry wants to shake her, (say the things she wants to say) she knows she must look like an idiot, standing there, not able to say anything as Dorrie’s final words ring in her ear, _whatever your problem is it’s got nothing to do with me_ , and she wants to say yes and _I’m sorry_ and _I’m scared_ but Dorrie is gone and she’s never felt so alone in a room _full of people_.)

The rest of the night is an awful blur and Kerry turns sentence after sentence over in her head, trying them out and rejecting each new one. Eventually she ends up outside with Dorrie, her friend, and a pig. It feels weirdly not that bad. Friend and pig leave, and then it’s just them, Kerry can’t remember feeling this cold in years, not since she got locked out of her house for three hours in fourth grade and had to sit on a neighbor’s porch for heat. In any other situation she would smile sideways at Dorrie and curl up in the other girl’s heat, but that’s not much of an option right now. 

She starts talking, because she’s the one who came out here in the first place and there doesn’t seem to be a better option and all her words sound _terrible_ and _way too much of the truth_ but some part of them must be working because she can see Dorrie’s face softening (even though it _shouldn’t be_ , because Kerry was _mean_ and Dorrie _didn’t deserve that_ and for weeks after she will apologize until Dorrie makes her watch three seasons of Degrassi in a row and kisses her on the couch and then she stops feeling so terrible because she is sorry and Dorrie knows and it won’t happen again and maybe she was bad at dealing with her feelings but everyone on Degrassi is a thousand percent worse) and after she’s done talking they stand in the show for a moment and flakes are stuck in Dorrie’s eyelashes and her nose is red and she is smiling and Kerry can’t remember why she was so scared in the first place. 

Before they walk back inside, Dorrie reaches out and firmly clasps Kerry’s hand in her own. Kerry does not want to pull away. They dance, and hair is flying everywhere and Dorrie drives her home. In the car Dorrie kisses her shoulder and when Kerry gets inside she does not want to rip her skin off. (the secret is, nothing has changed, she is the same, but tonight she is happy and that is not a thing to be erased.)


End file.
